How to Make Big Things Happen with Grouped Campaigns in AdWords

Earlier this month Google introduced campaign groups and performance targets to AdWords. The concept is simple enough: in addition to having goals for individual campaigns, you can also set goals for a group of campaigns and track their performance from the AdWords dashboard.

This allows you to combine various campaigns and get the all working towards bigger advertising goals. And, instead of maintaining a separate spreadsheet to track their performance, you can now do everything from within AdWords.

How to create a campaign group

To get started you first need to create a campaign group, which you can do by clicking Campaigngroups from the left column menu:

Next, click the + CAMPAIGN GROUP button and you’ll be asked to name your campaign group and select which campaigns you want to include. It really is as simple as that.

At this point you can also set your performance target or do it later. Either way, once you’re finished, click Save and stick the kettle on (also optional).

Set your performance target

There are two ways to set a performance target for campaign groups. You can either set one when you create your group (as mentioned above) or set them to existing groups at a later stage.

To do that, go back to the Campaign groups in in the left navigation panel, click the campaign group you want to set your performance target for.

Click the Performance target tab and then hit the + Performance target button. Next, you’ll need to choose which metric you want to track: clicks or conversions. These are your only two options at this stage, although Google did test a spend metric during trials that didn’t seem to make roll out . Once you’re done, click Save and that’s your campaign group set up with with a performance target. Done!

Why should I use campaign groups?

There aren’t many too advertising goals that can’t be reinforced by using multiple campaign types. To maximise conversions on a landing page, for example, you’ll often want to combine search ads with a YouTube video campaign and then follow up with some remarketing.

The same can go for product pages and you’ll often team up shopping campaigns with remarketing or other campaign types. Normally, the aim is to maximise conversions on that page by generating leads from different sources. And you can group campaigns with different goals (purchases, free trials, downloads, etc.) and measure them by total conversions.

You could already do this before Google introduced campaign groups into AdWords. The trouble was you had to export your campaign data into a spreadsheet, group them together manually and create a pivot table to see how they were performing. Now, you can do all this from the AdWords dashboard.

It’s great timing, too, considering the build-up to Christmas is fast approaching. Campaigns groups are ideal for making big things happen over the Black Friday weekend and the festive shopping period that follows.

Why would I set clicks as my performance target?

If you’re new to the idea of campaign groups, you might be asking why you would bother to set clicks as a performance target. It’s a fair enough question and you probably will set conversions as your target 90% of the time – perhaps even more. But there are times when clicks might be a genuine advertising target of yours.

This could be for events, major promotions, announcements or other campaigns where getting the message out there is your main aim. However, once you introduce any ticket booking, email sign up or other conversion you’ll probably want to shift your performance target.

It’s also important to remember grouped campaigns are different from ad groups. You can still have your conversion goals for each individual campaign and track the overall clicks for your group. Group campaigns don’t affect the way your ads are delivered or individual campaigns are optimised.

Have you been grouping campaigns manually before Google introduced the feature into AdWords or are you new to the whole thing? Let us know how you get on with campaign groups and performance targets. Or get in touch with us if you need any advice on how to use them.